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It was a rare cold day when I struggled through the crowd out of the station in Moscow, and began fighting with the sledge-drivers who asked a hundred roubles to take me to the Metropole. I remembered coming here a year ago with Colonel Robins, when we made ten roubles a limit for the journey and often travelled for eight.
"My kit is all in here." Crawshay laid his hand upon the operator's shoulder in peremptory fashion. "Then you will have to do without it for the present," he replied coolly. "Outside." The young man turned on his heel and disappeared without a word. Crawshay glanced once more at the dismantled instrument, then followed Robins on to the deck, carefully locking the door behind him.
"My camp on Rainy Lake faces the south and in front is a little stunted black ash tree, so dwarfed, gnarled, twisted, and homely that it is almost pretty. I refrained from cutting it down because of its attractive deformity. In the springtime, a few years ago, a pair of robins chose it as their nesting place.
The winds grew even higher, shriller; the falls of snow vanished before drenching, brown rains, and the afternoons perceptibly lengthened. There was arbutus on the slopes, robins, before he recognized that April was accomplished. A farmer ploughed the vegetable garden behind the house; and Honduras dragged the cedar bean poles from their resting place. Mariana soon appeared.
"I didn't have myself from the first," I reminded her, "and I believe only a few trifles less than Jim does. I know that robins ascend without visible means, for example, if you run at them; but I believe it's good to run at them just the same, even more enjoyable than if they sat still to be caught." "We were speaking of dogs," said Miss Lansdale. "At any rate Jim had you from the first."
When o'er their boughs the squirrels run, And through their leaves the robins call, And, ripening in the autumn sun, The acorns and the chestnuts fall, Doubt not that she will heed them all. For her the morning choir shall sing Its matins from the branches high, And every minstrel voice of spring, That trills beneath the April sky, Shall greet her with its earliest cry.
Others described in detail how Prince Aristoff and his Adjutant, Captain Robins, of the British Army, had fought bravely to the last and when about to be taken prisoners, used the last bullets remaining in their pistols to end their lives, thus preventing capture.
When he was only a little over three years old, I found him carefully mending some windfall robins' eggs, cracked by their tumble, with bits of rubber sticking-plaster, then putting them hopefully back into the nest, with an admonition to the anxious parents to "sit very still and don't stwatch."
I reached the old home under the hill, delighted to see once more the eyes which looked love to eyes that spoke again, to hear the familiar spring chorus from the river, the first robins and bluebirds rejoicing over the resurrection of nature, to explore each sheltered nook for the early cowslips, violets, pussy-willows, dandelions, and crocuses; to gossip with my old friends the chipmunks, the muskrats, and the woodchucks; to revisit each mossy hollow and sequestered retreat in my much loved pine woods; to whittle again the willow whistles, to caress the opening buds and tiny green growing blades of grass; to float once more in my little boat under the embracing arms of my chums, the oaks, birches, and hemlocks I loved so well; to watch the first flight of Psyche, the butterfly, so emblematic of the soaring of the immortal soul from the body dead.
Who knows? Only there seems to be a parasitical principle in Nature that runs all through her works, in the vegetable as well as in the animal kingdom. Why is the porcupine so tame and stupid? Because it does not have to hunt for its game, and is self-armed against all comers. The struggle of life has not developed its wits. Why are robins so abundant?
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